The Practical Tech Leader

Most tech leaders fail not because they can't code, but because they can't see — they miss the invisible costs their decisions impose, frame structural problems as people problems, and recognize the patterns about five years too late. The Practical Tech Leader is the working manual for the discipline that engineering leadership actually is: not a natural extension of technical competence, but its own thing, with its own mechanics. Forty-plus years inside engineering organizations — from early personal computing through the AI transition — distilled into five domains and forty-seven chapters of testable patterns. Not motivation. Legibility. The book for leaders who want an accurate map, not a comfortable one.